Related papers: A large difference in the progenitor masses of act…
Galaxy evolution can be studied observationally by linking progenitor and descendant galaxies through an evolving cumulative number density selection. This procedure can reproduce the expected evolution of the median stellar mass from…
A central challenge in observational studies of galaxy formation is how to associate progenitor galaxies with their descendants at lower redshifts. One promising approach is to link galaxies at fixed number density, rather than fixed…
We propose a general framework leveraging the halo-galaxy connection to link galaxies observed at different redshift in a statistical way, and use the link to infer the redshift evolution of the galaxy population. Our tests based on…
Comparing galaxies across redshifts at fixed cumulative number density is a popular way to estimate the evolution of specific galaxy populations. This method ignores scatter in mass accretion histories and galaxy-galaxy mergers, which can…
We analyse the mass assembly of central galaxies in the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulations. We build merger trees to connect galaxies to their progenitors at different redshifts and characterize their assembly histories by focusing on the…
We present the evolution of galaxy sizes, from redshift 2 to 0, for actively star forming and passive galaxies in the cosmological hydrodynamical 1003 cMpc3 simulation of the EAGLE project. We find that the sizes increase with stellar mass…
The cumulative number density matching approach equates number densities between adjacent redshifts to derive empirical galaxy evolution tracks from the observed galaxy stellar mass function. However, it is well known that this approach…
Aims: We present a new method that uses luminosity or stellar mass functions combined with clustering measurements to select samples of galaxies at different redshifts likely to follow a progenitor-to-descendant relationship. As the method…
Using the cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamical code GADGET-3 we make a realistic assessment of the technique of using constant cumulative number density as a tracer of galaxy evolution at high redshift. We find that over a redshift…
We investigate the evolution of galaxy masses and star formation rates in the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environment (EAGLE) simulations. These comprise a suite of hydrodynamical simulations in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmogony…
The cumulative comoving number-density of galaxies as a function of stellar mass or central velocity dispersion is commonly used to link galaxy populations across different epochs. By assuming that galaxies preserve their number-density in…
Studying the average properties of galaxies at a fixed comoving number density over a wide redshift range has become a popular observational method, because it may trace the evolution of galaxies statistically. We test this method by…
Using observed stellar mass functions out to $z=5$, we measure the main progenitor stellar mass growth of descendant galaxies with masses of $\log{M_{*}/M_{\odot}}=11.5,11.0,10.5,10.0$ at $z\sim0.1$ using an evolving cumulative number…
Sparse regression algorithms have been proposed as the appropriate framework to model the governing equations of a system from data, without needing prior knowledge of the underlying physics. In this work, we use sparse regression to build…
We present a study on the stellar mass growth of the progenitors of local massive galaxies with a variety of number density selections with $n\le1\times10^{-4}\,\rm{Mpc^{-3}}$ (corresponding to $M_*=10^{11.24}\rm{M_{\odot}}$ at z=0.3) in…
Connecting galaxies with their descendants (or progenitors) at different redshifts can yield strong constraints on galaxy evolution. Observational studies have historically selected samples of galaxies using a physical quantity, such as…
Massive quiescent galaxies have much smaller physical sizes at high redshift than today. The strong evolution of galaxy size may be caused by progenitor bias, major and minor mergers, adiabatic expansion, and/or renewed star formation, but…
Galaxy populations at different cosmic epochs are often linked together by comoving cumulative number density in observational studies. Many theoretical works, however, have shown that the number densities of tracked galaxy populations…
The growth of galaxies is a key problem in understanding the structure and evolution of the universe. Galaxies grow their stellar mass by a combination of star formation and mergers, with a relative importance that is redshift dependent.…
Understanding the evolution of galaxies provides crucial insights into a broad range of aspects in astrophysics, including structure formation and growth, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, baryonic physics, and more. It is,…